Go
tell it on the mountain, Madame Hillary.
My agents tell me that Hillary is
packing up and heading out to the Colorado mountains, there to organize with
Huma and their tattered band a guerrilla movement much as Hillary’s heroes, Che
and Fidel, did in Oriente province so many years ago. It is the stuff of
leftwing legend. Possibly she will even grow a beard. It is the only hope she
has left to break the glass ceiling.
In the meantime I have been asked how I knew since June of 2015 Donald
Trump would win this year’s election. Actually I put my money on Donald back in
2013 when he spoke at our annual Robert L. Bartley Dinner. On that occasion the
Spectator gave him the Boone Pickens Award for entrepreneurship. Though
our featured speaker was Senator Ted Cruz, Donald gave an acceptance speech,
which official Washington should have paid close attention to. With wit, charm,
and astonishing political insight he spoke seemingly off the cuff. The
speech is available on YouTube
and (in shorter form) on our website.
He talked approvingly of being a
“negotiator.” He talked of how foreign countries were “scoffing” at us,
presumably for President Obama’s hapless attempts at “leading from behind.” He
added that Obamacare is “a disaster.” He went into detail and said that
Obamacare would get worse by 2016. Very presciently he said that Obamacare
would present the Republicans with many opportunities in the election of 2016. Though
he worried about the election because Republicans do not stick together. That
became a theme with him.
Republicans follow the lead of an
unnamed senator whom Donald quoted as saying, “We can’t win.” (I was reminded
of that when I was flying on his campaign plane with him last month and he
tweeted something to the effect that Republicans lose because when the pressure
is on — as it then was because of old tapes of him engaging in locker room
humor — Republicans do not “stick together.” That rang a bell with me. I wrote
a whole book about it back in 1992 called The Conservative Crack-Up.)
Yet, at our Bartley dinner, he was upbeat. He believed in free
enterprise, he said. He spoke of what the country could do “if you let this
great country go.” He spoke of his “love of this country.” Now it was “going in
the wrong direction.” He seemed to have some ideas for changing that direction.
A couple of months later in Trump Tower he told me he thought he would run for
president. Unlike others, I never doubted that he was serious.
He brought his ideas to the
campaign along with attributes perfectly suited for America’s new era of
politics. Shall we call it the New Politics of 2016? The progressive left was
bankrupt. It was delusional. It lived in the past. Donald could bring the
talents of a successful builder and entrepreneur to government. He lived in the
world of finance and of entertainment. We have an entertainment culture, and
now he would make politics entertaining. When in June 2015 he announced his
candidacy from Trump Tower, I wrote “he
is going to run a great race for president, and at the end of the day” he is
going to have “the last laugh.” And “one thing more: his children are his
greatest monuments.”
Well, they may well prove to be.
They certainly performed well in this campaign. On October 16 when the Washington
Post had released those tapes about Donald saying back in 2005 that he
could “grab any woman by the puppy” — the prudish Post reported puppy as
“p—y,” but we all knew what the Post meant — I took no note. Why would
Donald grab a woman’s puppy? Yet the elites thought he was finished. Hillary
may have climbed to a ten-point lead over him, but I wrote Hillary “should not
have been secretary of state and she will not be president.”
I suggested that the Americans
recognized “the greatest campaigner of my lifetime,” Donald Trump. He was the
perfect candidate for our era, and Hillary is off to the mountains — forever.
